Comment Re:No HD?? (Score 1) 69
Does anyone know what the function of the X/Y/Z drives are in the xbox?
If you said disk cache/swap space you'd be correct. Not all of the 10GB on the default xbox HDD is available to the user. Without looking at exact figures you cough up about a 1GB to the C drive for OS related stuff and about 1.5GB to the X/Y/Z drives. The default user drive is ~5GB for saves and whatever else an unmodded xbox holds there. Then there is 2GB of unformatted space (unformatted due to the original HDD size of the xbox being 8GB).
I'm not entirely sure why they'd want to deny developers the use of swap space. The only reasons I can think of from their standpoint is that they want to get people to pay extra money. It's ridiculous to think they are doing this for cost cutting reasons because buying the amount of HDDs in bulk a Sony or Microsoft is going to buy they're probably able to get 20GB HDDs for $5-10 per unit. The high price points on these boxes is probably due to paying IBM/ATI/NVIDIA's R&D fees more than anything else. Making prototypes and molds is what costs money not fabrication in existing assembly lines.
Even though the specs on these next-gen boxes seem outrageous. I think Sony would be doing a huge disservice to developers (and gamers) by not providing that HDD swap area as a default. It seems like Sony is ignoring the good parts of the XBox much like Nintendo ignored the good parts of their competition (and started losing share to Sega [Genesis] then almost the whole market to Sony [PS]). Microsoft isn't building the spec superior box this time out (in order to beat Sony to market), but defaulting to an HDD (and if you think they are going to offer non-HDD models as has been posted here then you need to consider the OS being used is Win2K based [as is the original XBox] and probably weighs over 1GB AND Xbox Live software needs to live somewhere writable since it's always being updated thus the box needs the HDD in order to live) will only help them take market share in the long run.
If you said disk cache/swap space you'd be correct. Not all of the 10GB on the default xbox HDD is available to the user. Without looking at exact figures you cough up about a 1GB to the C drive for OS related stuff and about 1.5GB to the X/Y/Z drives. The default user drive is ~5GB for saves and whatever else an unmodded xbox holds there. Then there is 2GB of unformatted space (unformatted due to the original HDD size of the xbox being 8GB).
I'm not entirely sure why they'd want to deny developers the use of swap space. The only reasons I can think of from their standpoint is that they want to get people to pay extra money. It's ridiculous to think they are doing this for cost cutting reasons because buying the amount of HDDs in bulk a Sony or Microsoft is going to buy they're probably able to get 20GB HDDs for $5-10 per unit. The high price points on these boxes is probably due to paying IBM/ATI/NVIDIA's R&D fees more than anything else. Making prototypes and molds is what costs money not fabrication in existing assembly lines.
Even though the specs on these next-gen boxes seem outrageous. I think Sony would be doing a huge disservice to developers (and gamers) by not providing that HDD swap area as a default. It seems like Sony is ignoring the good parts of the XBox much like Nintendo ignored the good parts of their competition (and started losing share to Sega [Genesis] then almost the whole market to Sony [PS]). Microsoft isn't building the spec superior box this time out (in order to beat Sony to market), but defaulting to an HDD (and if you think they are going to offer non-HDD models as has been posted here then you need to consider the OS being used is Win2K based [as is the original XBox] and probably weighs over 1GB AND Xbox Live software needs to live somewhere writable since it's always being updated thus the box needs the HDD in order to live) will only help them take market share in the long run.
